fixed or fixed/fixed?

[tbushnel]

I am working on acquiring parts for a track bike which I intend to race some but also use on the road. My question is about rear hub choice. I do not want a free wheel. The decision is between a one-sided fixed or two sided.

Is there any downside to having a cog on each side? It strikes me as convenient to be able to adjust your gearing (at least a little) by just turning your wheel around and using the other cog.

I guess the other question I could stick in here is whether the Phil Wood hubs are worth the extra money for someone like me who will race some, but will ride more on the road (due to the seasonal nature of an outside velodrome).

Any thoughts are appreciated.
Ted.
:banana:

[Serpico]

I would go for flip-flop hub, that's what I have on my surly karate monkey.

Mine is free/free but I am switching it to fix/free.

[11.4]

First, fixed/fixed is a generally nicer way to go:

Advantages --

1. Two cogs you can swap between (although without adjusting chain length you may only have a couple tooth difference available). You can also mount a single-cog freewheel on one fixed side so you have a bailout gear -- it doesn't have to be a different gear ratio, but you can coast if you want to.
2. If you strip threading on one side of the hub, you haven't lost the whole wheel.
3. If you ride a steeply banked track, you tend to wear one side of a tire disproportionately. With a fixed/fixed, you can flip the wheel and then wear the other side. You get longer tire life.
4. Spoke lengths are the same on both sides of the hub and, for most hubs, your front and rear spoke lengths are the same (e.g., Phil High Flange with a 615 mm ERD tubular rim uses 295.5 mm for the rear and 296.0 mm for the front). You can basically have a couple spoke lengths and cover all your wheel building needs.

Disadvantages --

1. You put two different cogs on a fixed/fixed and then find on the road that you have too little chain to use a larger cog or not enough length on your stay ends to use a smaller one. Always check this out carefully on the stand beforehand.
2. The rear flanges are closer together (typically center-to-flange distances are 29-30 mm if there's a cog and 41-44 mm if there isn't one, so you go down from 75 mm or so to 60 mm flange-to-flange distance). This means your wheels are nominally less stable. However, when I true wheels I can literally stand on either the spokes or on opposite sides of the rim and not have problems, so I doubt this is meaningful.
3. You usually need to buy another lockring.
4. Most people don't really flip rear wheels, so the unused cog tends to get grimy and never gets the use you envisage.
5. Weight, if that matters to you.
6. You have to decide how you want to run your rear wheel spokes. Most people have the pulling spokes on the outsides of the flanges, but if you turn this wheel around to use the other cog, pulling spokes are on the inside. I tend to set up such wheels with pulling spokes always on the right hand side, so they're always on the outside of the drive-side flange regardless of whether the wheel is flipped or not. This is mostly a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" kind of argument.

As for Phil Woods, they are superb for road fixed-gear use -- perhaps even better than for track. On the road, you can use most kinds of track hubs, but the Phil's are pretty much maintenance free, completely repairable if a bearing goes bad, and you can swap bearings between the red super-sealed bad-weather bearings, the black low-friction bearings for track, and the super-fine ceramic low-friction racing bearings. You can also for road purposes install a quick release axle in the hubs if you want, although I'm happy with a bolt-down hub that only needs a 6 mm allen key rather than a peanut butter wrench to remove it. Phil's are heavier than other hubs by a small measure, but they last forever, have incredibly fine customer service, and now come in black and silver and, if you find the right shop, in pink, blue, red, green, and other great colors. I totally recommend them.

[Too Tall]

11.4 PM me.
PS - Great low down on Phil track hubs. I never realized the flanges would be diff.

[Brian Smith]

I think a double-sided track hub would have been good for me so that I could change gears between events at the track without needing to remove and install cogs/chainrings. I ended up riding the same gear for all events in a field that had a lot of people changing gears for each event.

I think Phil hubs are very chi-chi and look great, but I also think that if Shimano can make a hub for less than $10 wholesale which will hold an adjustment for years of use, then any hub that costs more than $100 had better do at least that. Phils are easier than some to replace bearings in, but really, I've seen too many that develop slop early in their service life. The slop doesn't break the axles, and doesn't seem to affect the bearing friction, but still it's slop, and too me it's annoyingly dissatisfying. I like my bearings to not be loose at all, and it's easy to find parts that permit that. There isn't a $10 Shimano track hub, but their are others less expensive than Phil which have adjustable bearing clearances and spin fine. I wish I had more good things to say about an attractive looking product made by real people in a small company, but shucks, they just don't do it for me.

As far as changing gears around on the road, I doubt that someone who has so many early questions about hubs will actually find that to be a useful feature. A theoretical benefit never realized. Just pick a gear and use it, being able to modify it slightly mid-ride is not going to make all the difference for you. The person I know with the most all-around fixed gear experience runs the same size cog on each side of their double-sided hub, and that includes a hefty amount of steep up and down off-road usage.

Here's a company making hubs I've been "working with" lately:
www.levelcomponents.com
No worries about stripped lockrings or the whole cog/hub interface. Seems quite nice so far. A little weighty, but it's not noticeable whilst riding...
The bearing clearances are not adjustable, but so far no play has developed, and I've even pounded the snug fit axles out of the bearings and hubs a few times, so it's so far so good.

Fixed can really be fun.
Enjoy it, whatever you choose to bolt onto the rig.

[Too Tall]

Pretty round assessment. Nice to hear all angles.
I'm racing track and fixed / fixed is perfect for pre-race. I will have a 15 / 16 and it is my backup / training wheel so I can save the nice carbon Nimble crosswind for when it counts.

I've never had cartridge bearings dev. slop. Can you explain some more? Did the cartridge become loose in the fixture (hub)?

[Dekonick]

As far as tire wear, you can just take it off and re-install it flipped - essentially the same thing but you dont need 2 cogs.

TT - where are you riding track? The closest one I know of is in PA. I would like to come watch once or twice.

[11.4]

A few comments on this interesting thread:

Dekonick, removing and reversing the tire is easy with clinchers, but remember that most track wheels are tubular. Prying off a well-glued tubular without loosening the base tape and then having to reglue it is a pain. A second cog is easier.

Brian, I'm interested in your comments about sloppy bearing fit. How many wheels have you actually seen with the problem, and what caused it? I have a collection of Phil Wood hubs I use for road fixed and track training purposes (track race wheels are all carbon disks and the like), and I've never had a problem. Dealers like Business Cycles and World Class Cycles that sell a lot of Phil hubs to track riders haven't seen problems, nor have the big messenger shops like Freewheeling on Hayes or Yojimbo that sell specialized Phil hub setups. The Phil axle can sometimes have a slight bit of movement of the bearing on the axle, but after it's locked down by the axle cap, there isn't any movement left. And the locking effect of the axle cap will cause significant binding if the bearing isn't completely seated in the hub shell. Although I've seen spoke tension stretch Chris King and low-flange Campy track hubs so that the bearing sets become loose in the hub shell, I've never seen this on the heavily overbuilt shells of a Phil hub (even a low flange one). Possibly the bearings settled in and needed to be retightened (most Chris King hubs need this treatment as well), but that shouldn't be a knock on the hub. I'd be interested in seeing just what problems showed up.

There are a lot of good fixed hubs available out there today. Phil isn't the only solution -- it just has worked out the bugs, prices are reasonable, service is first rate, and you can get special orders such as odd drillings, slotted spoke holes, quick release axles, and wild colors. I played with a couple pairs of Level hubs, and thought the quality was generally there. My basic problem with them in the end was this: what are my odds of finding a needed cog on the track centerfield five minutes before an event? Or what are the odds of finding cogs or parts if the company doesn't make it? I once had some Dura Ace 10 equipment, and today it's a collectors' curiosity. Once burned ... . Kudos to the Level guys for thinking up a different way to do it, but it's not likely to gain significant popularity or availability unless one of the major hub manufacturers adopts it as well. Too bad that things work that way, but unfortunately they usually do.

[Brian Smith]

Pretty round assessment. Nice to hear all angles.
I'm racing track and fixed / fixed is perfect for pre-race. I will have a 15 / 16 and it is my backup / training wheel so I can save the nice carbon Nimble crosswind for when it counts.

I've never had cartridge bearings dev. slop. Can you explain some more? Did the cartridge become loose in the fixture (hub)?

Wow, never?
I find that most cartridge bearing hubs develop slop, and only some allow you to adjust for it besides replacing the bearings.
Most often, I think, what happens is that the bearing is able to be installed into the hub body very nicely, but that assembling the axle such that the shoulders on each side of the bearing's I.D. are exactly in the right spot to minimize bearing side loads and to eliminate the axle moving with respect to the inner race of the cartridge bearing.
Many track cartirdige bearing hubs, and many from Japan in general, retain the threaded axle and adjustable cones/shoulders to permit precise adjustments. That design, in my experience, works very well.
Keep in mind that it is much less expensive to machine a hub and axle to accept a cartridge bearing than it is to produce a cup and cone ball bearing. It is not for precision alone that the cartridge bearing style is the one most used in hubs from smaller companies. Does that mean they can't be as good as cup and cone bearings, assuredly not, but it does take effort to do them right, and many of the lightest eschew important (to me) things like serviceability, low friction, and service life to achieve their aims.
Fixed gear bikes, especially with a slight tight spot in the chain adjustment, can place a substantially increased amount of load on a hub bearing/axle, as evinced by the rate at which a chain can elongate when the wheel is adjusted to make the chain quite tight. I run cartridge bearing hubs front and rear in my commuter fixie, but they were selected for the attributes of adjustability, servicability, and bearing smoothness. What have you got, T.T.?

[tbushnel]

I really appreciate all of the responses. It is nice to have so many knowledgeable people here in the forum.
Ted.

[Too Tall]

For fixed gear hubs I run Nimble Crosswind, Old old ancient Campag High flange and (soon) Phil Wood. Nimble never needs service, it's race only going on two years of road racing plus a few thousand miles of joy rides. *I install a nimble fixed gear hub shell for track. Campag need yrly re-pack...they get run in bad weather.
I've used Phil Wood hubs both freewheel and cassette since they were prototyes. I have had a number of cartridges with lube that became bad...this caused rumble, tightness etc. etc. Easy to fix....in every case I cleaned the cartridge in solvent...washed and repacked...all better.

No slop, ever. Honest chief. I've fixed several cassette hubs for guys who thought they had bad bearings. The problem was , as you noted, an unseated bearing (behind the cassette)....how it happens is beyond me but easy to fix and seems to be a long term fix.

As I understand it the chain should not be tight.

[Dekonick]

A few comments on this interesting thread:

Dekonick, removing and reversing the tire is easy with clinchers, but remember that most track wheels are tubular. Prying off a well-glued tubular without loosening the base tape and then having to reglue it is a pain. A second cog is easier.

Ahhh - good point.

Sooooooo - Too Tall - where are you riding track anyway? PA?

[Samster]

Is there any downside to having a cog on each side? It strikes me as convenient to be able to adjust your gearing (at least a little) by just turning your wheel around and using the other cog.


Just make sure the cogs and chain length are matched enough so that you won't have too much slack in the chain when you flip (or flop).

I used to do this, but really, I never switched gears. But that's just me.

--sam

[Too Tall]

Dek., not this weekend. This is final prep. and taper for Tandem TT Champ. event this coming weekend. End of Sept. is the Maryland track champs. and I'll be there than WITH MAH PHIL WOOD wheels :)

[11.4]

Hmmm. I was reminded of another interesting point regarding fixed/fixed vs. single fixed hubs on the road. I was swapping bikes with another rider who was interested in seeing what a fixie felt like, and I flipped the rear wheel give a lower gear. Wellllll ....., dropped the chain inadvertently between the cog and the flange. Couldn't get it out. Looked like an idiot. Couldn't even coast sidesaddle and kick, which I had to do once when I broke a chain. I had to hoof it three miles with the bike on my shoulder. The lesson is ... there are plenty of reasons to have a fixed/fixed, but on-the-road swapping is not one I'd actually openly advocate. I didn't do it before, did it for odd reasons this one time, and now would never do it again. Lesson learned.

[Too Tall]

Huh? you didn't have a chain whip on you? Oh the shame...the shame ;)
Sorry, Dek...I'm racing at Trexlertown track.

[11.4]

Gosh, TT, I had the chain whip. Kept it with my bottom bracket wrenches in the left hand jersey pocket. I just forgot the Var lockring pliers. Dang.

[Too Tall]

You use a lock ring? Geek. bannana. lmao